The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Saturday, November 5, 2016

More Parental Alienation: What Are the Characteristics of Rejected Parents?

Internet sites focused on “parental alienation” (PA)
during high-conflict divorces give vivid descriptions of the behavior and moods
of children who unreasonably reject and avoid one of the parents, while
preferring and seeking the other one. Some such sites also describe the
preferred (or “alienating”) parents as suffering from personality disorders
like narcissism, which drive them to brainwash children and to make false
accusations against the rejected parent. These descriptions are questionable
and concerning because in most cases the preferred parent has not been seen by
the practitioner who suggests these diagnoses.

There seems to be much less discussion of the
characteristics of the rejected parent. Does rejection take place “at random”,
so anyone involved in a high-conflict divorce is as likely to be rejected as
anyone else in a similar situation? Or are there characteristics and behaviors—other
than actual abusive treatment-- that make a parent more likely to be rejected
by his or her child? Given that human relationships are ordinarily
transactional, or influenced both by characteristics of all members and by time
and experience of interaction, it seems most likely that everyone in the
conflict contributes something to what happens, whether for good or ill.

Not surprisingly, and quite humanly, rejected parents
tend to feel that they have done and said nothing that would make the children
reject them. But as it turns out, there have been a few comments on how
characteristics of rejected parents may help to drive the process of rejection.
These suggestions are not based on careful empirical work with large numbers of
cases and so should be considered with some caution, but I think they are worth
a look.

Descriptions of characteristics of rejected parents
have been given by Barbara Jo Fidler, Nicholas Bala, and Michael Saini in their 2013 Oxford
University Press book Children who resist
postseparation parental contact, and were further discussed by Nicholas
Bala and Katie Hunter in a 2015 Queen’s University Faculty of Law research
paper (“Children resisting contact & parental alienation: Context,
challenges, & recent Ontario cases”; 2015-056).

Here are some of the characteristics suggested as more
likely to belong to parents rejected by their children in the course of a
high-conflict separation and divorce, as described by Bala and Hunter:

·Harsh,
rigid and punitive parenting style

·Outrage
at child's challenge to his/her authority

· Passivity or withdrawal in face of conflict

· Immature, self-centered in relation to child

· Loses temper, angry, demanding, intimidating
character traits, but not to level of

abuse
(an important point, as a parent may not perceive this “permissible” behavior
as problematic—JM)

· Counter-rejecting behavior (the parent
responds to the child’s rejection with coldness and hostility—JM)

· Lacks empathic connection to child

·Inept
and unempathetic pursuit of child, pushes calls and letters, unannounced or

· May use force to reassert parental position
(this, of course, may be easier when a court has been persuaded to order
treatment including an abrupt custody change, or transport of the child to a
treatment facility by hired “transport staff”—JM)

I
would add to these points a term that I have not heard used for some years, but
which I think describes an important consideration in both high-conflict and
other divorces. The term “funneling” has been employed to describe situations
where a noncustodial parent

continues
to treat a visiting child just as he or she did when last sharing a home with
the child—for example, if the separation occurred when the child was three
years old, the parent may continue to read the bedtime stories the child liked
then, even if five years have passed, or may continue to come into the bathroom
at will even when the child is nearing puberty. These are not abusive
behaviors, but certainly demonstrate a lack of empathy and therefore (when
combined with other factors) may be part of the picture when the child rejects
and avoids the parent.

My
point in this post is not to attack or defame rejected parents, but simply to
say that because human relationships are largely bidirectional and transactional,
it would be surprising if child custody issues did not share those characteristics.
Therefore, we could hardly expect rejection of a parent to be due entirely to
the character traits and actions of the preferred parent, or even to those of
preferred parent and child combined. Neither could we expect genuine changes in
relationships to be brought about simply by custody change without serious work
to alter the factors the rejected parent brings to the situation.

However,
I want to emphasize the fact that none of the descriptions of either preferred
parent or rejected parent characteristics are at this point supported by
systematic investigation of a large number of cases.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.